Requiem for a Patriot: Rest in Power, Airman Aaron Bushnell
Two Americans -- one patriot, one traitor -- at the gates of the Israeli embassy
There are some images that you’ll never forget. There are some videos which you see and hear which stay with you.
So it is with the self-immolation of U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell who lit himself ablaze at the U.S. embassy in protest of America’s support of the genocidal Israeli policies. Before he succumbed to his wounds Bushnell posted the following to social media.
Okay, then, these are the stakes. Thank you, Airman Bushnell. His name — Aaron — recalls Moses’s brother. Moses never saw the Promised Land and now neither will Aaron. Age 25, gone too soon.
Aaron Bushnell knows that America, too, is under an occupation and that the Palestinian cause is rapidly become the American one—notwithstanding the efforts to ignore it altogether. But every American knows, deep down, what’s really going on so it’s only fitting that a mere boy makes it clear. After all, Aaron studied in New Hampshire, a state made famous by its slogan: “Live Free Or Die.” Indeed.
Watching the video — and hearing the screams — I recalled another attempted suicide at the Israeli embassy — that of traitor and Naval intelligence Jonathan Pollard, many years before in 1985 and as recounted in James Bamford’s masterly book, Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence:
“Suddenly, at about 10:20 a.m. Pollard made a right onto International Drive and then another sharp right, following a car through a gate that had just opened, which then closed behind him. Seeing the blue-and-white flag with the Star of David atop the sand-colored building, the FBI agents finally realized where Pollard’s massive cache of documents had gone. One of the agents quickly notified FBI headquarters, “Pollard just turned into the Israeli embassy!” Later, Special Agent Eugene Noltkamper said, “A diplomatic vehicle was going into the compound, through the gate, and the Mustang followed it through.” Surveillance cars began arriving from all directions as agents got out and began peering through the gate and fence with bulky black binoculars.
As the steel gate clanked shut behind him, with the growing crowd of angry FBI agents on the opposite side, Pollard pulled up to an underground garage and stepped out. “I’m a Jew!” he shouted as loudly as he could. “I need help. The FBI is after me.” Almost instantly, a security guard with a cocked pistol confronted him. “This isn’t good,” Pollard thought to himself, seeing that he might suddenly be caught in a crossfire between Israeli guards and FBI agents. Then a group of five or six embassy people came out and gathered with the guards a short distance away.
Meanwhile, inside the embassy, frantic calls were made to Tel Aviv, where it was about 8:30 p.m. Rafi Eitan was at home when he got the message and quickly reached for his secure “red phone.” “I immediately said, ‘Throw him out,’” Eitan later recalled, adding that he had no regrets. “If we hadn’t removed him,” he said, “officials in the United States—including the Jewish lobby—would have been compelled to remove him from there by use of force… Granting asylum to Pollard in the embassy, even for a few minutes, would have immediately caused an extremely serious diplomatic conflict between the countries, [and] not have prevented his arrest.”
One of the security guards left the group and approached Pollard, telling him forcefully that under orders from Israel, he was to leave immediately. Pollard couldn’t believe what he was hearing, and Anne suddenly began crying hysterically. “This is where the knife really went deep into the back,” she would later say. Pollard said that there were twenty FBI agents waiting for him outside. “Do you know what they’ll do to me?” he asked in a near shout. Now the guard was even more firm. “Those are the orders from Jerusalem. Leave!” he said. Pollard was incredulous. “I said, ‘I know what’s going to happen and I’m not prepared for this. Just shoot me. You’ll say that you thought I was a terrorist, and it was a car bomb. Just do it now, quickly. Don’t think about it.’” But no one took him up on his suggestion.
That was, of course, way back when the FBI actually arrested Israeli spies — instead of raiding FBI agents like Johnathan Buma committed to exposing Israeli spies.
Today Jonathan Pollard, released by President Donald Trump and flown back to Israel aboard top Trump donor Sheldon Adelson’s jet where he met a grinning Netanyahu and kissed the Israeli ground, is praising his friend Itamar Ben-Gvir for having his “heart in the right place.”
Pollard, subject of a new four part TV series, even has plans to run for the Knesset. He’s made no secret of his hope to ethnic cleanse Gaza: “I say we move the resident Arab population out [of Gaza],” Pollard said. “I don't care where they go. My preference is for Ireland. I think the Irish deserve it. Irish MP Richard Boyd Barrett has even donned a keffiyeh.”
Pollard’s handler Aviem Sella was pardoned by President Jared Kushner in the final day of his administration. No word if Sella is related to Adam Sella, the Israeli-American author of the widely discredited New York Times story about the Hamas rapes. You simply must read Arthur Bloom’s take down of the Times: “The New York Times Caught Fabricating Israeli Propaganda, Again.”
Back to Airman Bushnell, they say suicide is the coward’s way out. Perhaps it is. But then what of the men who martyred themselves at Masada? Were they cowards too? Were they “mentally ill”? And what was John Brown’s mental state anyway when he plotted on Harper’s Ferry?
The chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Moshe Dayan, began holding the swearing-in ceremony of Israeli Armoured Corps soldiers who had completed their tironut (IDF basic training) atop Masada. The ceremony ended with the declaration: "Masada shall not fall again."
It’s a noble gesture this martial martyrdom but I agree with Patton: “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” What do you do, though, if both sides in a conflict seem to think they are dying for their country?
This is why we have courts. You weigh their claims. You subject them to science, justice, and rational inquiry to the task at hand. You ask difficult questions of the New York Times and the Washington Post and Twitter hiring active Israeli intelligence officers posing as regular employees. If someone says there was a rape, or a beheaded baby, you demand the forensics.
Yes, to take our country’s security seriously we’re going to have to go there. To be sure this may well prove altogether challenging when we have plenty of fifth columnists operating within our society. No one said self-government was going to be easy.
In the final analysis this is a counterintelligence operation, which will require us asking deeply uncomfortable questions of our allies and even our fellow citizens. And yet it must be done.
It’s true that Airman Aaron Bushnell is, as he wishes, “no longer complicit in genocide” he might have remembered his oath to repel all enemies foreign and domestic. That requires staying alive. It requires fighting in the courts, and in the halls of Congress, and in the streets. God knows I’ve done my part.
No, we don’t kill ourselves in our pursuit of justice. We live.
We confront, we challenge, we publish, we expose, we invent, we move past, we struggle, we resist, but most of all, we live and we endure.
I shall go down tomorrow and lay some flowers at the Israeli embassy gates. They’re for Aaron, the young man who wanted to free Palestine, and may just yet free America.
Did you hear that Peter Thiel resigned from the AbCellera board for unspecified "personal reasons"? What's up with that?
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